So you've read all the guides that say you need a controller to beat Furi. The game itself tells you that a controller is recommended every time it starts up. But you're a PC gamer. You don't own a controller. And you don't want to buy one.

If you own a controller, or don't mind buying one, by all means use it. By all accounts the game will be easier. But I'm here to tell you that Furi is completely beatable on keyboard & mouse. I have S-ranked Furrier difficulty and I have never owned a controller. Unlike many games that are designed with controller in mind, Furi actually works quite well on keyboard & mouse. The devs seem to have put some thought into making the game playable and beatable with it.

There are however, a couple of things you can do as a keyboard & mouse player to make things a little easier, which I go over in this guide.

Note that while I have S-ranked Furrier, I am by no means an expert at Furi. I have put 67 hours into the game as of writing this guide. So please take whatever is written here with the appropriate grain of salt. And if you know of any other useful tips specific to playing with keyboard & mouse, please let me know in the comments.

I recommend binding your parry key to one of the side mouse buttons under your thumb. I personally have a Logitech gaming mouse and I bind one of the side keys using the Logitech Gaming Software. Other brands should have similar software to do the same. If you don't have a gaming mouse, then well, ask yourself, what's a better investment, a gaming mouse or a controller? I know which one I picked.

This may not sound like a big deal, but I find it much easier to parry consistently with this. Firstly, the side buttons on a typical mouse have a much shorter actuation distance than a typical keyboard (even a "gaming" keyboard), meaning the parry is more likely to register exactly when you press the button. But more importantly, this lets you parry without moving your fingers off of the movement keys, which also naturally leads to faster response times.

In fact, with parry bound to a mouse button under your thumb, you never need to move any of your fingers ever. You can keep your left hand fingers on movement, left hand thumb on Space for dodge, right hand fingers on shoot and slash (and charged shot), and right hand thumb on parry. Can controller users say that? (Answer: I don't know. I don't own a controller)

Similarly, for Onnamusha, I recommend binding the "stance switch" key to a side mouse button under your thumb. My mouse has two buttons on the side, so this works perfectly for me.

You generally want to switch stances often with Onnamusha, and with precise timing, and having it somewhere you can press easily without moving your fingers off of movement makes this much easier.

If this isn't an option for you, you might try switching it from the default R to something like Shift that you can press with your pinkie (but I don't recommend putting parry on Shift, because it will be much harder to get the timing right with your pinkie).

You don't need to put star power on a mouse button (unless you've got extra to spare I guess). You activate star power relatively rarely and don't really have to time it exactly like with parry and stance switch.

The key to getting good with keyboard & mouse is understanding the mouse controls options in the in-game settings. Different settings are better in different scenarios, and the defaults aren't necessarily going to be what you want to use most of the time.

The first setting is the reticle mode setting. The options are either screen or radial. This setting affects the little blue/orange circle that you move around with the mouse to aim your gun.



In radial mode, the reticle is fixed to within a certain radius of you. Whenever you move, the reticle moves with you. In screen mode you can move the reticle anywhere on the screen, and it moves independently if you.

The main advantage of reticle mode is that you never lose the reticle among the mess of bullets. It also allows you to keep your eyes on the rider, rather than constantly looking back and forth on the screen between the rider and the boss.

The advantage of screen mode is that it's easier to aim, and also you don't have to re-aim every time you dash away. For example. The Song has a section in phase 2 where she stands still and shoots beams at you that you have to dodge through sideways. With screen mode, you can keep your gun on target while you dodge, whereas with reticle mode you have to re-aim every time you dodge the beam. In general, with reticle mode you constantly have to re-aim as you move.

Personally, I always use reticle mode, because I find it too easy to lose track of the reticle in screen mode, and I prefer to keep my eyes on the rider. I don't find it too hard to constantly keep on aim in my periphery. However, I can't deny that there are major advantages to screen mode and you should definitely try it out if you haven't. In many respects, screen mode shooting is an advantage over controller, where you don't even have a reticle.

The next important option is the movement mode option. A more accurate name for this would be "dash mode", because it affects how your dash works. The options are reticle and directional.



This setting is confusing as it's presented, but the basic thing to understand is this:

"Directional" means dash follows keyboard and "reticle" means dash follows mouse

Let's look more closely at the two modes.


With directional dashing, you dash in the direction you are moving. The direction you are facing to shoot is completely irrelevant. An important thing to note is that dashing is always directional in the close quarters sections (the parts where you don't have your gun), regardless of what this setting is set to. So even if you hate directional dashing for some reason you will need to learn how to do it.

Quite simply put, the advantage of directional dashing is that you can dash without moving your mouse off target, and the disadvantage is that you can only dash in eight directions.

Personally, I recommend almost always using directional dashing. It's the way dashing works in most keyboard and mouse games, so it's more natural, and as I noted, it's the way it always works in the close combat sections. Most importantly, directional dashing lets you dash without moving off target. This isn't just about being easier to do, it also increases your DPS. With reticle dashing, even if you manage to get quite good at it, you will always miss a shot or two because of "flicking" the mouse whenever you have to dash away from or orthogonal to the enemy. DPS is absolutely critical in this game. You always want to move the boss to the next phase of the fight as quickly as possible. In quite a few cases, you can completely skip attacks (in some cases, very difficult attacks), simply by KOing the boss before they can get to them (just as an example, with enough DPS you can completely skip the annoying clone attack in The Scale phase 5).

The important thing here is mitigating the fact that you can only dash in eight different directions. If you know what the attack is going to be, you should try to position yourself so that you can dash up, left, right, or down to avoid it (usually up is the easiest because of the camera, with left and right being the next easiest). Note that for radial wave attacks, you don't always have to dodge directly into them (normal to the curve). Instead, you can often just dodge up or to the side and avoid the wave as it passes you by. So while it may feel that 8 directions is too restricting, for most attacks it really isn't that bad. Also remember that you can do a charged dash if you are bad at timing the dodge for a given attack (with the trade-off that you can't shoot or move while charging a dash).

Finally, it's really helpful to understand exactly how directional dashing works. The way it works is that when you press Space (or whatever you have dash bound to), you will dash in the direction you moved last. You can also change this direction as you press or hold Space by pressing the WASD direction, but the key thing is that you don't actually have to press a WASD direction along with Space. You can just press Space by itself, and you will dash in the direction you moved last.

What this means is that you can tap W to orient yourself up, then press Space and you will dash up. This is very useful for sections where you know you will need to dash through something but need to wait for the right moment to do it (for example, the relatively slow moving radial waves at the beginning of The Song phase 3). Note that if you are shooting your gun you can't actually see the direction you moved last, since your character will always face toward where you are shooting, so you'll typically just need to remember the direction in your head (or just tap it again when you press Space if you aren't sure).


With reticle dashing you dash towards your mouse reticle (hence the name). Reticle dashing means that you can now dash in any direction, not just one of the multiples of 45°. But the downside of this is that you must move your mouse off target to do so.

It's possible to get good at "flicking" your mouse to dash away from stuff while shooting. But as I mentioned above, I generally don't recommend this setting for most shooting sections because even if you get good at flicking, your DPS is inherently going to suffer.

However, there are some sections where you will want to switch over to reticle dashing. I do this in The Scale final phase, The Burst final phase, and The Beat phase 2 (in Furrier), but you may decide other phases are worth doing this in as well if directional dashing is too hard. The good news is that you don't actually have to dodge away from where you are shooting in these sections, so the above argument does not apply (with the exception of Furrier The Beat phase 2, but directional dash dodging through that ♥♥♥♥ is so hard it's worth doing the "flick" dashing IMO).

Yes, it's annoying, but it is absolutely worth opening the settings and switching this setting in the middle of these fights to do these phases (just remember to switch the setting back when you are done).

Very important here: if you decided to use "screen" reticle mode (see above), switch to "radial" reticle mode when you use reticle dashing. The reason for this is that with the radial reticle, a non-charged dash will dash you right to your reticle, assuming you have it as far from your character as possible (actually you dash to just before the reticle, but since you are usually dodging something that is moving towards you, you can treat it as if it is right to the reticle).

I can't stress how useful this is. The Scale final phase is usually one of the hardest parts of the game in Furrier. But with radial/reticle dashing, it's almost trivial. Just move the mouse to a part of the screen that's "safe" and press Space to teleport to it, and repeat. To contrast, I've never been able to beat it with directional dashing. (I wish I could say The Burst final phase is as trivial, but it still requires a bit of skill because you have to do some charged dashing and moving around, but it's definitely way easier with reticle dashing than with directional dashing).

That's all I've got for keyboard & mouse tips. The game is still hard, so don't expect this to change that. It will be hard on a controller too. But with enough practice it will get easier. It's just as beatable on keyboard & mouse as any "keyboard & mouse centric" game of similar difficulty.

If you need help with the game itself check out some of the other guides on here. For Furrier difficulty, I found ABG's guide to be invaluable. If you haven't beaten Furi difficulty yet I do recommend avoiding spoilers for the best experience.